Tuesday, 6 March 2007

At all three of our call centres infotel, findmeahotelroom and findmeaconference we are passionate about giving an “excellent customer experience”. I kid you not, it sounds cheesey but that's what strive to achieve. Our telephone systems intelligently recognise hoteliers, clients who have outstanding bookings, clients who have booked before etc and routes callers to, not only the right department, but the right person in that department. No infernal buttons to press and minimum wait time (like seconds not minutes/hours).

I, along with 100% of the human race, hate “sorry for asking you to wait for 16 hours, but your call is really important to us” call centres. So you can imagine my dismay and frustration when yesterday I spent all morning and most of the afternoon trying to conduct a transaction that had to be completed by close of business. If human beings had been involved it would have taken 2 minutes.

The problem, it appeared, was that “the system won’t accept your details”. GREAT. Just get a fucking form and write the information out in longhand until your IT department can give the system a beating so that it will accept my details! I kept getting the “I do apologise” guff. Don’t apologise just get the job done. It ain’t rocket science.

I finally had to threaten to get someone sacked and – guess what – it made no difference at all! “I do apologise that you feel that way madam, but we really are doing our best to resolve the situation”. My blood pressure went into outer orbit. Little old ladies like me should not be subjected to this life sapping debilitating bullshit.

Late afternoon I finally lucked on a saint. She imposed HER will on the sodding system and bludgeoned it to death. Job done in time for Coronation Street.